To the editor:
I did a double-take the other day when I went into our Brown County IGA to do my grocery shopping. There on a table display, set up right inside the front doors, near the flower bouquets and the newest in-season produce, was a rifle. This was only a few days after the massacre in Las Vegas, so maybe I was more dumb-struck by the sight of that rifle there than I might have been at some other time. But I don’t think so.
I’m not an expert on rifles, so I don’t know exactly what kind of rifle it was, but it looked to me far more like what military personnel carry than what a hunter is likely to take to the woods to shoot game for sport or food.
What was that rifle doing in the entry area of the IGA? It’s not uncommon to see people there collecting donations for one good cause or another — The Salvation Army, for instance. The Girl Scouts sell their wonderful cookies there. It’s a great local family kind of store, after all. A rifle there? It didn’t compute in my brain. A sign told me that the Shriners were raffling that rifle off.
Now I was even more dumb-struck. When I think of the Shriners, I think of their wonderful hospitals for children, where those without insurance are treated for free and even those with insurance have their co-pays waived. I think of the Shrine circus and Shriners taking part in holiday parades. I’ve always thought of the Shriners as representing good fun and fellowship and service.
Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if the proceeds of their raffle will go to support their hospitals or some other good service. But why a rifle? In the entry of the local family grocery store?
If I had had a little more time to think about all this, I might have attempted to engage the two men behind the table in some conversation about my concerns. But I had just returned home after many hours of air travel. I was tired, and their rifle had taken me completely by surprise. All I could manage to do at the moment was to look both of them in the eye, one at a time, and say to them, “I am horrified by what you are doing.”
My horror is not mitigated by my understanding of the Second Amendment. I practiced and taught law before I became a minister, and I do know a fair amount about the legalities and arguments pertaining to the Second Amendment. I would not have had any inclination to argue with those two men about what have come to be called these days “Second Amendment rights.”
What left me speechless in my grocery store the other day was not anything pertaining to rights. Instead, it was what the presence of that rifle in that place at that time says to me about the state of our culture these days — about the state of our human values.
By making a prominent display of a rifle just a few days after the most deadly shooting massacre in modern U.S. history — right there with the flowers and the produce, right there where we and our children are used to seeing Girl Scout cookies and The Salvation Army’s kettle — both the Shriners and the Brown County IGA seem to me to be saying it is quite all right for guns, tools made specifically and exclusively for killing, to be regarded as altogether ordinary and welcome as a prominent presence anytime and anyplace throughout our culture.
Well, I do not agree. I am, as a matter of fact, horrified.
Rev. Barbara Child, Brown County
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